Sigmund Freud's Mind-Blowing Quotes on Dreams and the Unconscious

One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful. Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, make sure that you're not surrounded by fools. When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it. Love and work. Work and love. That's all there is. Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways. Out of your vulnerabilities will come your strength. Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion. Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility and most people are frightened of responsibility. Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have so to speak pawned a part of their narcissism. In the small matters, trust the mind. In the large ones, the heart. A certain degree of neurosis is of inestimable value as a drive, especially to a psychologist. Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires. Men are more moral than they think and far more immoral than they can imagine. Beauty has no obvious use, nor is there any clear cultural necessity for it, yet civilization could not do without it. The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is what does a woman want? He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips. Betrayal oozes out of him at every pore. The intention that man should be happy is not in the plan of creation. We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. Being entirely honest with oneself is a good exercise. We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. Where does a thought go when it's forgotten? Just as no one can be forced into belief, so no one can be forced into unbelief. A woman should soften but not weaken a man. Experience teaches us that the world is not a nursery. Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more. It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement. Words have a magical power. They can bring either the greatest happiness or deepest despair. It is that we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love. Never so helplessly unhappy as when we have lost our loved object or its love. He does not believe that does not live according to his belief. When making a decision of minor importance, I have always found it advantageous to consider all the pros and cons. Everywhere I go I find a poet has been there before me. Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality. Life, as we find it, is too hard for us. It brings us too many pains, disappointments, and impossible tasks. In the depths of my heart, I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with a few exceptions, are worthless. Neurotics complain of their illness, but they make the most of it, and when it comes to taking it away from them, they will defend it like a lioness her young. Words are capable of arousing the strongest emotions and prompting all men's actions. The ego is not master in its own house. The voice of the intellect is a soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality to let itself be compelled to suffer. The pleasure of satisfying a savage instinct, undomesticated by the ego, is incomparably much more intense than the one of satisfying a tamed instinct. Where I'd was, their ego shall be. In mourning, it is the world which has become poor and empty in Manacolia. It is the ego itself. Everyone has wishes which he would not like to tell to others, which he does not want to admit even to himself. The virtuous man contents himself with dreaming that which the wicked man does in actual life. Dreams may be thus stated. They are concealed realizations of repressed desires. The ideas so far produced are insufficient for the interpretation of the dream. Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness. If you want to be smart, spend your time in the shower because it's the sanctuary where the mind dances freely, where creativity flows like water, and where solutions emerge from the steam of contemplation. The scope of one's personality is defined by the magnitude of that problem which is capable of driving a person out of his wits.